As the creator of Spotify, Daniel Ek has certainly left his mark on the music industry. Now he’s setting his sights on a new arena of innovation: healthcare.
Ek recently co-founded a biotech startup called Neko Health, which offers full-body scans that use AI to help identify and prevent diseases ranging from cancer to diabetes. After taking four years to quietly build the product, he and his team emerged to announce their first round of funding at $65 million.
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare has become an area where many companies are keen to innovate—which makes it all the more difficult to stand out. After reading about the funding, I hopped over to the company’s website to see what I could learn from a marketing standpoint. The copy is minimal, but the language they’ve put together works well—and there are some timeless lessons to be learned, or at least reminded of.
Let’s take a moment to look at three key takeaways from this rising brand in the biotech sphere.
Craft a hardworking hero message.
Landing on Neko’s homepage, I was greeted with the following headline: “Your health checkup got upgraded.” This line achieves a great deal in just five words. First of all, it tells me the “what” right away—we’re talking about a health checkup. For a busy and impatient reader—which is every reader of a marketing website—this kind of clarity is always welcome. It’s a strong enticement to keep reading.
But it’s the next phrase—“got upgraded”—that takes the line from merely communicating the “what” to providing the “why.” We all like to be upgraded—to a newer phone, bigger house, better airplane seat. In fact, the simple desire for “more” was identified by Australian social researcher Hugh Mackay as one of the ten drivers that make human beings tick. So Neko has effectively piqued my interest.
Interestingly, the line speaks in the past tense: the upgrade has already happened. This is subtly reassuring—exciting, even. It comes across as a bit of unexpected good news. Paired with futuristic moving images that depict the scan’s capabilities, the copy all adds up to a well-crafted hero message that feels appealing to the reader—and unique to Neko.
Use proven formulas to structure your copy.
Further down the homepage, I encountered a secondary headline—a triptych that read: Detect. Prevent. Relax. From famous lines like “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” to enduring structures like Aristotles’ beginning, middle, and end, something about three-of-a-kind just makes sense to the human brain—and it’s employed well here.
The line does a nice job of pairing the rational with the emotional. “Detect” and “Prevent” make promises that feel more grounded and practical: this is what the product can do. “Relax,” speaks more to the emotional benefit, or, how the product will improve the reader’s life.
Still further down the page, Neko employs yet a third structure that makes for easy comprehension and effective persuasion: problem/solution. Under a heading titled “Your Heart,” matched with an image of a man getting his chest scanned, we see the body copy: “Go beyond arm blood pressure. Get a whole-body mapping of your cardiovascular health.” Here Neko delivers a one-two punch, setting up the problem and then clarifying how their product solves it. The takeaway? It’s deceptively simple—and predictably effective.
Express your “why” in a fresh, memorable way.
Heading over to the “About” page, we get a closer look at Neko’s reason for being. In branding, you’ll often hear about a company trying to own a single word. Famous examples include Volvo being synonymous with “safety,” and Coca-Cola with “happiness.” Finding a word that sums up your identity isn’t easy, but it can provide a leverage point for all the work you produce moving forward.
As the Greek mathematician, philosopher, scientist, and engineer Archimedes put it, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.”
For Neko, that word seems to be: proactive. Perhaps the best expression of this strategic positioning is in their theme line: Ahead of your health. Not only is this line saying the right thing, but it’s doing so with some serious poetic power, leveraging both alliteration (the H’s in both words pair nicely) and assonance (the matched “ea” sounds are pleasing to the ear).
As a bonus, the line incorporates the word “your”—always a plus in marketing language, as it brings the audience to the forefront. And ultimately, it has a futuristic, predictive ring to it that reinforces the brand’s positioning.
All revolutions begin with language.
Though the messaging is minimal, Ek and his cohorts have done a fine job of using words to stake out their position in the crowded biotech space. At MarketSmiths, we partner with companies to help them communicate what they do in a way that’s unique, compelling, and memorable. If you’d like to learn more about how we might do that together, get in touch.
